Battle vs. Love: Words for marketing toys to boys and girls

Crystal Smith, author of “The Achilles Effect,” is creating a buzz with Wordle clouds showing the stark differences in terminology used in toy commercials aimed at 6-to-8 year old girls and boys.

Smith analyzed dozens of commercials. She came up with a list of 658 words used to describe boys’ toys like Hot Wheels and Transformers and 432 for girls’ toys like Barbie and Easy Bake Oven. Her conclusion is stated in her headline: “How Toy Ad Vocabulary Reinforces Gender Stereotypes.”
The full lists are available on PDFs linked from her blog, where she writes:

[O]n the boys’ list the word battle appears 28 times, compared to two occurrences for words like create and experience. Side-by-side comparisons of the alphabetical lists are also interesting. Scrolling down to the “b” words, we see terms like bash, battle, beat, big, blaster and brawl on one list and words like ballet, beach, beautiful, bling, and butterfly on the other.

Commenters on Boing Boing were divided among those who thought it was obvious, outrageous or a natural result of the differences between girls and boys. Then there was one who thought “killer boots” straddled the line.